Married couples are at a record low, census analysis shows

By Carol Morello, The Washington Post •December 14, 2011 7:55 pm

The proportion of adults who are married has plunged to record lows as more people decide to live together now and wed later, reflecting decades of evolving attitudes about the role of marriage in society.

Just 51 percent of all adults who are 18 and older are married, placing them on the brink of becoming a minority, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census statistics to be released Wednesday. That represents a steep drop from 57 percent who were married in 2000.

The statistics offer a snapshot in time, and do not mean the unmarried will remain that way. They are a byproduct of a steady increase in the median age when people first marry, now at an all-time high of over 26 for women and almost 29 for men.

“I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to get married someday,” said Kate Shorr, 30, a lawyer and lobbyist who until recently wrote a blog about her social life in Washington, A Single Girl Doing Single Things. “All of us want to meet that special person and marry, but there’s no real rush to do that. Especially in the career-driven society we have here. You don’t move to Washington, D .C., to get married, you move here for your career.”

The marriage patterns are a striking departure from the middle of the 20th century, when the percentage of adults who never wed was in the low single digits. In 1960, for example, when most baby boomers were children, 72 percent of all adults were married. The median age for brides was barely 20, and the grooms were just a couple of years older.

“In the 1950s, if you weren’t married, people thought you were mentally ill,” said Andrew Cherlin, a Johns Hopkins University sociologist who studies families. “Marriage was mandatory. Now it’s culturally optional.”

The decline in marriage rates has affected people in every age and ethnic group, but it has been steepest among the young.

A Pew survey last year determined that more than four in 10 Americans younger than 30 consider marriage passe.

“They see it as an obsolete social environment,” said D’Vera Cohn, a Pew researcher who co-wrote the analysis. “People say they want to get married, but Americans are much less likely to actually be married than in the past.”

The slide has worsened with the economy.

Rose Kreider, a Census Bureau demographer who specializes in household statistics, noted last year that 7.5 million couples were living together without being married, a 13 percent jump in just one year. Many had a partner who had lost a job, or they could not afford to maintain two homes.

Most college graduates will marry, eventually. Nearly two in three college graduates are married now, compared to less than half with a high school education.

“They’re pulling in two incomes, marrying and doing pretty well,” Cherlin said. “People without college educations are having a harder time finding jobs, and they’re reluctant to marry.”

Bradford Wilcox, head of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, said marriage is fading fastest in communities with many residents with the least education.

“Half the births to high school-educated moms are out of wedlock,” he said. “Among that group, we’re at a tipping point. Marriage is losing ground among middle Americans. They were doing okay until the last decade or so, and now they’re the most at risk. College-educated folks have been doing pretty darn well.”

The generation born during a time of rising divorce rates in the 1970s and 1980s say that watching their parents split convinced them not to rush.

“I come from divorced parents, and most of my friends do” said Shorr, whose father advised her to stay single until at least age 35. “It’s a matter of not wanting to rush into something, get in over our heads and make a mistake. A lot of us saw our parents make mistakes. We’re going to take our time and make sure we don’t make the same mistakes.”